i have been advised by a friend to set one up with somewhere that has servers in the uk, as this is preffered by google regards to google rankings, can you tell me if your servers are in the uk??

I'll confirm this with my colleague at work (as he is a registered Google Adwords professional) but i'm sure that there isn't a reliable way for Google to determine the location of the servers so this shouldn't be too much of a problem SEO wise. In terms of SEO you want to look at the other main aspects relating to content, meta tags, inbound links etc

I believe Google does look at location of servers, at least for their country specific sites such as google.co.uk (trying to show sites relating to your country / area) - not that Google ever reveals much for certain. A lot of what SEO professionals talk about is based on speculation and experiments.
Nowadays most IP checks are pretty reliable on identifying the location (or at least the country) a server is located in - sure there are ways around that but definitely more effort (and expense) than just using a UK based hosting provider.